What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

Christopher Hitchens (1949 - 2011) was an Anglo-American author and journalist. His books made him a prominent public intellectual and a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He was a columnist and literary critic at Vanity Fair, Slate, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry and a variety of other media outlets. He was named one of the world's "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Britain's Prospect.

Ever since Tom Lehrer recorded his imperishable anti-Christmas ditty all those years ago, the small but growing minority who view the end of December with existential dread has had a seasonal "carol" all of its own:

Christmas time is here by golly: disapproval would be folly.
Deck the halls with hunks of holly, fill the cup and don't say when.
Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens, mix the punch, drag out the Dickens.
Even though the prospect sickens—brother, here we go again.

The world, which Christopher Hitchens would have happily admitted was already pretty dark, got a little darker yesterday. With his death, it also got a lot emptier.
Christopher was a beacon of knowledge and light in a world that constantly threatens to extinguish both. He had the courage to accept the world for just what it is, and not what we would like it to be. That is the highest praise I believe one can give to any intellect. He understood that the Universe doesn’t care about our existence, or our welfare, and epitomized the realization that our lives have meaning only to the extent we give them meaning.Read more (richarddawkins.net)

By Windsor Mann, editor of “The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism”

It’s hard to say anything about Christopher Hitchens that hasn’t been said already, but it’s even harder to say nothing. Hitchens died last week, a year-and-a-half after he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He and I were not lifelong friends or family members, but I got to know him fairly well. We met nearly seven years ago, and it’s safe to say that, during this time, Hitchens mattered more to me than I did to him.

I’ve just been reviewing my experiences with Christopher Hitchens.
He informed me, entertained me, provoked me like nobody else, and I will miss his antic spirit more than I can say. I didn’t know him for long, though I’d been reading his pieces, with mixed reactions, for years. We met in early 2007, and had dinner in Las Vegas, where we were both appearing in an Amazing Randi meeting. He kindled a happy bonfire of discussion that continued intermittently in meetings and emails.

The moment it was announced that Christopher Hitchens was sick with cancer, eulogies began spilling into print and from the podium. No one wanted to deny the possibility that he would recover, of course, but neither could we let the admiration we felt for him go unexpressed. It is a cliché to say that he was one of a kind and none can fill his shoes—but Hitch was and none can. In his case not even the most effusive tributes ring hollow. There was simply no one like him.

The place where Christopher Hitchens spent his last few weeks was hardly bookish, but he made it his own. Close to downtown Houston, Texas is the medical centre, a cluster of high-rises like La Défense of Paris, or the City of London, a financial district of a sort, where the common currency is illness. This complex is one of the world's great concentrations of medical expertise and technology.

Almost as many words have been written about Christopher Hitchens since he died as he would write in a typical working week. He was one of very, very few people on earth whom I would have missed just as much had I never had the pleasure and fortune of knowing him. He lit fires in people’s minds. He was an educator.

On 7 October, I recorded a long conversation with Christopher Hitchens in Houston, Texas, for the Christmas edition of New Statesman which I was guest-editing.
He looked frail, and his voice was no longer the familiar Richard Burton boom; but, though his body had clearly been diminished by the brutality of cancer, his mind and spirit had not.

How odd it is to hear of your own brother’s death on an early morning radio bulletin. How odd it is for a private loss to be a public event.
I wouldn’t normally dream of writing about such a thing here, and I doubt if many people would expect me to. It is made even odder by the fact that I am a minor celebrity myself. And that the, ah, complex relationship between me and my brother has been public property.
Read more: http://bit.ly/rz4lJG

Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after.

"Never be afraid of stridency"
Richard Dawkins: One of my main beefs with religion is the way they label children as a "Catholic child" or a "Muslim child". I've become a bit of a bore about it.
Christopher Hitchens: You must never be afraid of that charge, any more than stridency.

"Richard Dawkins has contributed an essay, written the New Statesman leader column, and travelled to Texas to conduct an exclusive interview with the author and journalist Christopher Hitchens. They discuss religious fundamentalism, US politics, Tony Blair, abortion and Christmas."

When it came to it, and old Kingsley suffered from a demoralizing and disorienting fall, he did take to his bed and eventually turned his face to the wall. It wasn’t all reclining and waiting for hospital room service after that—“Kill me, you fucking fool!” he once alarmingly exclaimed to his son Philip—but essentially he waited passively for the end. It duly came, without much fuss and with no charge.Read more.

How the Republican presidential candidates are benefiting from their “gaffes”: They’re not unforgivable, just
imprudent.

By Christopher Hitchens

“OK, that’s it,” said my guest a few nights ago. “That’s what?” “The Perry campaign: It’s officially over. Look, I’ve found the moment.” Together, in mild stupefaction, we watched as a fellow-creature, accoutred with gorgeous mammalian hair that is fully the equivalent of Mitt Romney’s, and fashioned in the very image of god, failed repeatedly to remember the names of the federal agencies that he had sworn to put out of their misery.

The great polemicist is certain to be remembered, but perhaps not as he would like.By George Eaton

"Nothing concentrates the mind more than reading about oneself in the past tense", quipped Christopher Hitchens on discovering that his death had been prematurely announced by the National Portrait Galler. A catalogue previewing an exhibition entitled "Martin Amis and Friends" had included a photograph of the polemicist, erroneously captioned, "the late Christopher Hitchens". A month later, he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer, lending his words a haunting new resonance.

How the conservative belief in American exceptionalism has become a matter of faith.By Christopher Hitchens

A small group of colonies manages to break away from a large empire in the closing years of the 18th century. The resulting state would probably be not much more than the Chile of the Northeast—a long littoral ribbon between the mountains and the ocean—if it were not for the imperial rivalries that allow for the rapid growth of the new republic’s influence.

Remembering our veterans and reflecting on the glorious ambiguity of Rudyard Kipling's war poetry.By Christopher Hitchens

I spent much of this weekend, as I often do this time of year, confining myself to writing and thinking about Rudyard Kipling. This may seem like a pretentious thing to be saying, but if you care about war and peace and justice and life and death, then he is an inescapable subject. The same is true if you care about modern English literature, which for no less inescapable reasons is intimately bound up with the great catastrophe of mortality that overcame British families between August 1914 and November 1918.

Why is it so hard to speak honestly about allegations of sexual harassment or our corrupt ally in Afghanistan?By Christopher Hitchens
There were two generally depressing controversies last week, in both of which an exercise of free speech might have done more harm than good. The first concerns our disordered policy in Afghanistan and the second our ongoing and increasingly dishonest discussion of sexual harassment.

If you were to set a competition for the headline most unlikely to appear in an American magazine, the winning entry would surely be jackie tacky or tacky jackie. In her life and even posthumously, it always somehow fell to Jackie Kennedy to raise the tone. An exacting task in her case, and exquisitely so when one appreciates that she had to raise the tone without ever actually admitting that the tone could use a bit of raising.

"The annual Texas Freethought Convention draws atheists, agnostics and humanists from around the world, and this year Christopher Hitchens is the star attraction.
David Brill meets the renowned writer and thinker, as he battles cancer and uses the last of his strength to denounce religion as immoral."http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/story/about/id/601379/n/Fighting-Faith

Anne Crumpacker’s new website on secular parenting dedicated to Hitchens.

"If you’re a regular here, you’ll surely remember the story of Mason Crumpacker, the eight-year-old Texas girl who asked Christopher Hitchens to advise her on good books to read. It was a touching story, complete with Mason’s heartfelt thank-you letter to Hitch and a narrative of the episode written by Anne Crumpacker, Mason’s mom."

There may conceivably be a reason to doubt the truth of the Obama administration’s claim that the “Quds Force” of the Islamic Republic of Iran went into the free market for murder in order to suborn the killing of the Saudi ambassador to the United States. But neither the apparently surreal nor the apparently flagrant nature of the thing would constitute such reasons.

Muammar Qaddafi should not have been killed, and his surviving son should be captured.By Christopher Hitchens

Surrendering to a feeling of deep impotence and slight absurdity, I borrowed an iPad on Thursday afternoon and used it to send my first-ever message by this means. It was addressed to one of those distinguished Frenchmen who have been at the fore in pressing the outside world to remove Muammar Qaddafi from the obscene toadlike posture in which, for more than four decades, he has squatted on the lives of the Libyan people.

Mitt Romney and the weird and sinister beliefs of Mormonism.By Christopher Hitchens

I have no clear idea whether Pastor Robert Jeffress is correct in referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more colloquially known as the Mormons, as “a cult.” There do seem to be one or two points of similarity. The Mormons have a supreme leader, known as the prophet or the president, whose word is allegedly supreme.

Here's the plan:
1. Make a short video. Aim for about 1 min length, give or take. Say anything you like, keeping in mind the nature of the effort. The only thing we ask is:

2. Close your video by raising a glass. It has been pointed out that Johnny Walker Black is Hitchens' drink, but obviously use what you like.

3. Email your video to thehitchappreciation@gmail.com. Use any means you like to send the file, but YouSendIt and WeTransfer are recommended if your regular email doesn't cooperate. YouSendit.com has minimal registration requirements, and WeTransfer has a 2G capacity and no registration. Speaking of file submission specs:

4. Keep the file size as small as is reasonable for now. We don't know how many submissions we will ultimately get. Quicktime & mov have been offered as desirable submission formats, but obviously the editors will do their best to work with whatever you're able to turn in.

Southbank Centre / Royal Festival Hall
November 9, 2011. 8.30pm
"In this special event for Intelligence Squared, Hitchens will be in conversation via satellite in Washington with his friend Stephen Fry who'll be on stage live at Royal
Festival Hall. This is a chance to hear one of the great public intellectuals of our age discussing politics, literature and, as he puts it, 'the things that make life worth defending - foes like faith and false consolation'.

Texas Freethought Conv:
The Dawkins/Hitchens speeches and Q&A will be available soon in professional quality video.
The actual conference DVD set will be on sale soon, but the Dawkins/Hitchens event will be a FREEBIE on behalf of the RDF, TFC, AAA and the professional film crew who make their living helping our movement.

Text of speech presenting the Richard Dawkins Award on behalf of Atheist Alliance of America, Houston, 8th October 2011

"Today I am called upon to honour a man whose name will be joined, in the history of our movement, with those of Bertrand Russell, Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Paine, David Hume. He is a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know. And I live in Oxford, his alma mater and mine."

What the execution of a World War II traitor can teach us about assassinating American-born terrorists.By Christopher Hitchens

The first thing to say, when reviewing the question of what America should do about those of its citizens who advocate the murder of random numbers of its civilians, is that it is flat-out astonishing to see the debate being conducted at all. Faced with jeering, sniggering, vicious saboteurs who hide from the daylight and pop up on blog and cheap CDs, calmly awarding religious permission for the capricious taking of life, what do we imagine Vladimir Putin would do?

HOUSTON — Christopher Hitchens, probably the country’s most famous unbeliever, received the Freethinker of the Year Award at the annual convention of the Atheist Alliance of America here on Saturday. Mr. Hitchens was flattered by the honor, he said a few days beforehand, but also a little abashed.

"Hitchens’ speech did not disappoint. He talked about his illness and noted that over the last year, he’d been coming to Houston regularly for treatment, presumably at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He was emphatic that though his “time” is rapidly approaching, he wouldn’t stop doing his best to shed light on the fraudulent claims made by religion, a line that brought the crowd to its feet."

Those who protest the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki have to say what they would have done instead.By Christopher Hitchens

Probably because it mainly provides the kind of short-term cinematic satisfaction that characterizes the Hellfire terminus, the flashy ending of al-Qaida’s main media star has only led to the reopening of some pressing questions about the nature of the jihadi menace.

We know that Pakistan's intelligence service is aiding terrorists. What are we going to do about it?By Christopher Hitchens

In Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Lt. Milo Minderbinder transforms the mess accounts of the American airbase under his care into a "syndicate" under whose terms all servicemen are potential stakeholders. But this prince of entrepreneurs and middlemen eventually becomes overexposed, especially after some incautious forays into Egyptian cotton futures, and is forced to resort to some amoral subterfuges.

"Christopher Hitchens has confirmed his intent go attend the AAA Convention in Houston on October 8th, to receive the Richard Dawkins Award for Freethinker of the Year. He will also be available to sign copies of his new book "Arguably", which will be for sale at the Convention."

ADVENTURES IN THE ORGASMATRON
How the Sexual Revolution Came to America
By Christopher Turner

In the classic confessional memoir “The God That Failed,” Arthur Koestler describes some of the characters who made up the constituency of his Communist Party group in Berlin in the early 1930s: “Among other members of our cell, I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich. He . . . had just published a book called ‘The Function of the Orgasm,’ in which he had expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cockeyed than it sounds.”

Arthur Koestler opened his polemic against capital punishment in Britain by saying that the island nation was that quaint and antique place where citizens drove on the left hand side of the road, drank warm beer, made a special eccentricity of the love of animals, and had felons “hanged by the neck until they are dead.” Those closing words—from the formula by which a capital sentence was ritually announced by a heavily bewigged judge—conveyed in their satisfyingly terminal tones much of the flavor and relish of the business of judicially inflicted death.

Debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Barry Brummett (Chair, Department of Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin) on the resolution "Religion has been a positive force in culture," June 4, 2011.

As 9/11 showed, civilization has enemies with which peace is neither possible nor desirable.By Christopher Hitchens
A continuous and repetitive thread in the commentary on the decade since 9/11—one might almost call it an endless and open-ended theme—was the plaintive observation that the struggle against al-Qaida and its surrogates is somehow a "war without end."

He had a medical emergency over the weekend but is now back at home and is doing ok, all things considered. He was not available to communicate before this morning. He is quite upset that he missed this event as he has never had to cancel at the very last minute before.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, the 2005 best-seller, Joan Didion dissected the trauma of losing her husband, John Gregory Dunne. With Blue Nights, to be published in November by Knopf, she agonizingly explores the heavier blow that followed: the death of their daughter, Quintana Roo.

The Telegraph| Christopher Hitchens’s provocative journalism is greater than the sum of its parts, argues Nicholas Shakespeare as he reviews Arguably.

Every generation tends to look silly to the one after; those beehive hairdos, those chain smokers. Reacting to previous experience, we don’t make progress, necessarily. Vicars have randy daughters and randy daughters give birth to boys who in turn become vicars.

"Anyone who occasionally opens one of our more serious periodicals has learned that the byline of Christopher Hitchens is an opportunity to be delighted or maddened — possibly both — but in any case not to be missed. He is our intellectual omnivore, exhilarating and infuriating, if not in equal parts at least with equal wit."

Don't miss the Book Review Podcast (Bill Keller on the career of Christopher Hitchens).

Three men: Mohamed Bouazizi, Abu-Abdel Monaam Hamedeh, and Ali Mehdi Zeu – a Tunisian street vendor, an Egyptian restaurateur and a Libyan husband and father. In the spring of 2011, the first of them set himself alight in the town of Sidi Bouzid, in protest at just one too many humiliations at the hands of petty officialdom. The second also took his own life as Egyptians began to rebel en masse at the stagnation and meaninglessness of Mubarak's Egypt.

LAST year, just before he was diagnosed with advanced oesophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens published the unexpectedly moving memoir Hitch-22.

"I soon enough realised when young," he revealed in that book, "that I did not have the true 'stuff' for [writing] fiction and poetry. And I was very fortunate indeed to have, as contemporaries, several practitioners of those arts who made it obvious to me, without unduly rubbing in the point, that I would be wasting my time if I tried."

As a journalist, Hitchens has done everything with his time except waste it. He has made himself the key writer of the post-9/11 age. No novelist or poet has registered the texture of the past decade as pungently as Hitchens has in the essay form.

A decade after 9/11, it remains the best description and most essential fact about al-Qaida.By Christopher Hitchens

The proper task of the "public intellectual" might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either.

“Christopher Hitches has the eye of a painter and the literary skill of a novelist. He infuses his essays with the same narrative thrust that can be found in the most addictive fiction.”

"Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens proves as mercurial as the man himself; it is at times infuriating, tedious, educational, gloriously candid, and completely hilarious. The man has an opinion on everything—literally everything from the genius of Charles Dickens to the virtues of masturbation."

Does the Texas governor believe his idiotic religious rhetoric, or is he just pandering for votes?By Christopher Hitchens

"I happened to spend several weeks in Texas earlier this year, while the Lone Star State lay under the pitiless glare of an unremitting drought. After a protracted arid interval, the state's immodest governor, Rick Perry, announced that he was using the authority vested in him to call for prayers for rain."

In the euphoria of the current celebrations, we must not lose sight of the former leader's foul deeds.By Christopher Hitchens

"In George Orwell's 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air, his narrator, George Bowling, broods on the special horrors of the new totalitarianism and notices "the colored shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons," but also, less obviously perhaps, "the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke."

Prolific writer and political journalist Christopher Hitchens will release a new book this September titled Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens.
The first new book of essays since 2004, Arguably features a collection of essays previously written for Vanity Fair – of which he is a contributing editor – Slate, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.

Product Description
The first new book of essays by Christopher Hitchens since 2004, ARGUABLY offers an indispensable key to understanding the passionate and skeptical spirit of one of our most dazzling writers, widely admired for the clarity of his style, a result of his disciplined and candid thinking. Topics range from ruminations on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men to the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard; from the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell to the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad. Hitchens even looks at the recent financial crisis and argues for arthe enduring relevance of Karl Marx. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It reveals how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. In this fashion, ARGUABLY burnishes Christopher Hitchens' credentials as-to quote Christopher Buckley-our "greatest living essayist in the English language."

Still, England has not yet collapsed into a nightmare of destruction and despair.By Christopher Hitchens

"I realized that the collapse of British society into a Hobbesian nightmare of mutual predation and despair was still some distance off when I caught two little straws in the wind. The first was a well-framed photograph of a badly scorched bit of London, taken on the morning after a night of riots and vandalism."

"At whose expense comes the mild irony when, this fall, the cheaply produced scandal sheet Private Eye will have an exhibition of its cartoons and pictorial covers at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a building consecrated to taste and restraint?"

"Reporting on the capture of the mass-murdering General Ratko Mladic by the Serbian government on Memorial Day, the New York Times summarized the newly created political situation like this: “Critical questions remain about precisely who protected Mr. Mladic. The pro-Western government of President Boris Tadic says it will investigate, a politically delicate examination that could lead to former government officials and perhaps even to religious authorities, since Mr. Mladic said after his arrest that he had been visited over the years by many priests.”

When was the last time a conservative NATO army pushed out its highest-ranking officers?By Christopher Hitchens

"To read of the stunning news, of the almost-overnight liquidation of the Ataturkist or secularist military caste, and to try to do so from the standpoint of a seriously secular Turk, is to have a small share in the sense of acute national vertigo that must have accompanied the proclamation of a new system in the second two decades of the 20th century."Read More (Slate)

The Think Inc 2011 event has now a new website with less graphics and more info. This year's line-up includes Neil deGrasse Tyson, Christopher Hitchens (via video link), Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Michael Shermer..

"Over at Truthdig, the celebrated journalist Chris Hedges has discovered that Christopher Hitchens and I are actually racists with a fondness for genocide. He has broken this story before—many times, in fact—but in his most recent essay he blames “secular fundamentalists” like me and Hitch for the recent terrorist atrocities in Norway."

Why did so many "experts" declare the Oslo attacks to be the work of Islamic terrorists?By Christopher Hitchens

"Having had 16 years to reflect since Oklahoma City, we should really have become a little more refined in our rapid-response diagnoses of anti-civilian mass murder. Rather than make it more difficult, the number of contrasting features in the most recent case of Norway actually makes this task fractionally easier. The fruit bat and troll population of the recent scenery of catastrophe, enriched with Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell characters, permits a wider view of the various fields of fire and a greater variety of arguable motives for analysis."

The British political class may stop asking the one question that has obsessed it for decades.By Christopher Hitchens

"It was about two decades ago, but I can still remember how long it took and how much atmosphere it sucked out of the room. In a sort of dress rehearsal for more recent events, a pair of Guardian reporters had produced a book about the inner workings of the lurid Murdoch tabloid style, and of its targets and beneficiaries."

In Britain, the Guardian takes on Rupert Murdoch's cynical view of what newspaper readers want to read.By Christopher Hitchens

"On a beautiful Sunday morning at Brideshead Castle, Sebastian Flyte breaks off a desultory conversation about religion and morality because he wants to immerse himself in the scandal sheets: "He turned back to the pages of the News of the World and said, 'Another naughty scout-master … oh, don't be a bore, Charles, I want to read about a woman in Hull who's been using an instrument … thirty-eight other cases were taken into consideration in sentencing her to six months—golly!"

Some questions for the "activists" aboard the Gaza flotilla.By Christopher Hitchens

"The tale of the Gaza "flotilla" seems set to become a regular summer feature, bobbing along happily on the inside pages with an occasional update. A nice sidebar for reporters covering the Greek debt crisis: a built-in mild tension of "will they, won't they?"; a cast of not very colorful characters but one we almost begin to feel we know personally. Such cheery and breezy slogans—"The Audacity of Hope" and "Free Gaza"—and such an easy storyline that it practically writes itself."

Hay Festival 2006.
"The contrarian traces the history of The Rights of Man from the publication of Part One in 1791 in London and its rapturous reception across the Atlantic. He analyses the meaning it has acquired since its creation, and its significance as the cornerstone of contemporary debates about our basic human rights."
In 4 parts.

Christopher Hitchens talks to Phil Maynard about his biography of Thomas Paine, Iraq, and US politics:
books.guardian.co.uk

The old parochialism meets the not-so-new isolationism in Michele Bachmann.By Christopher Hitchens

"That was actually three dripping custard pies, rather than just the one, with which Rep. Michele Bachmann assailed her own face by bragging to Fox News about her small-town Iowa roots. Having hymned the incomparable Dairy Queen and Wonder Bread facilities boasted by the sturdy small town of her girlhood, she went on to claim that "John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa," adding, "That's the kind of spirit that I have, too."

"At the Atheist Alliance of America (AAA) Convention, held in
conjunction with the Texas Freethought Convention, AAA will present
the 2011 Richard Dawkins Award to Christopher Hitchens for his
outstanding contributions to freethought. The convention, with a
theme of “From Grassroots to Global Impact”, will be held from October
7-9, 2011 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Houston, Texas."

"Wouldn’t it be great to have the best stories by Susan Orlean, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Lewis, Mary Roach, E.B. White, Mark Bowden, and hundreds of other nonfiction writers from the past 100 years available on one website? Now there is such a website: Byliner.com."

"This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason. In order to be persuaded by it, you would have to be open to propositions like this: “Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.”